Today’s “digital natives” are a new generation who want a new style of education.

Today’s “digital natives” are a 
new generation who want a new style 
of education.

Digital natives! Whenever the question of digital innovation in education is discussed, this is a term that immediately comes to the surface. But it should be avoided. Even the person who coined the term digital natives, Marc Prensky, admitted in his most recent book, Brain Gain, that the term is now obsolete.22

The concept is usually used to describe young people who were born in the digital world and for whom all forms of information and communications technology are natural. The adults who were born earlier are therefore “digital immigrants,” who try with difficulty to keep up with the natives. Prensky first coined both terms in 2001.23

With this concept, he referred to a group of young people who have been immersed in technology all their lives, giving them distinct and unique characteristics that set them apart from previous generations, and who have sophisticated technical skills and learning preferences for which traditional education is unprepared. However, Prensky’s coining of this term—and its counterpart for people who are not digitally native—was not based on research into this generation, but rather created by rationalizing phenomena that he had observed.24

As the digital native concept became popular, extra claims were added to the initial concept. Erika Smith, of the University of Alberta, describes eight unsubstantiated claims in the different present discourses on digital natives:25

• They possess new ways of knowing and being.
• They are driving a digital revolution and thereby transforming society.
• They are innately or inherently tech savvy.
• They are multitaskers,‡ team oriented, and collaborative.
• They are native speakers of the language of technologies and have unique viewpoints and abilities.
• They embrace gaming, interaction, and simulation.
• They demand immediate gratification.
• They reflect and respond to the knowledge economy.

Smith is not alone in concluding that there is little to no proof for these claims. A meta-analysis conducted in 2008 had already shown that there was little hard evidence to support the use of the term digital natives.26

But maybe the concept of digital natives was more a kind of prediction, and we just had to wait. Perhaps today’s young people are true digital natives. If we look at the research performed in high-tech Hong Kong by David M. Kennedy and Bob Fox, the answer is more nuanced.27 Kennedy and Fox investigated how first-year undergraduate students used and understood various digital technologies. They discovered, like danah boyd did with the American teenagers, that the first-year undergraduate students at Hong Kong University do use a wide range of digital technologies.

The students use a large quantity and variety of technologies for communicating, learning, staying connected with their friends, and engaging with the world around them. But they are using them primarily for “personal empowerment and entertainment.” More importantly, Kennedy and Fox describe that the students are “not always digitally literate in using technology to support their learning. This is particularly evident when it comes to student use of technology as consumers of content rather than creators of content specifically for academic purposes.”

Other researchers have reported that university students use only a limited range of technologies for learning and socialization. For example, one study found that “the tools these students used were largely established technologies, in particular mobile phones, media player, Google, [and] Wikipedia. The use of handheld computers as well as gaming, social networking sites, blogs, and other emergent social technologies was very low.”28 This finding has been supported by a number of other researchers who came to similar conclusions,29 namely that university students do not really have a deep knowledge of technology, and what knowledge they do have is often limited to basic Microsoft Office skills (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), emailing, text messaging, Facebook, and surfing the Internet.

When looking at the same topic in another continent, Europe, the large-scale EU Kids Online report of 2011 placed the term digital natives in first place on its list of the 10 biggest myths about young people and technology. Just 36 percent of Europe’s 9- to 16-year-olds said that they knew more about the Internet than their parents.30

Studies in other countries, including Australia, Austria, Canada, Switzerland, and the United States, all come to the same conclusion: there is no such thing as a generation of digital natives.